Fantasy for All Ages

Antagonists vs. Villains

I mentioned in my last post that I have trouble writing villains. I wanted to expand on that a little.

First, my early drafts are all about the protagonist, so the antagonist doesn’t make it onto the page as an individual with goals and feelings of his own until the second or even third draft. That’s just the way I work.

Then, I find that the advice that your antagonist should think of himself or herself as the hero of his or her own story is sound. It helps a lot–for most antagonists. Not so much for villains. There’s a difference, at least for me.

Most of my stories have antagonists:

1) In THE SHAMAN’S CURSE, Maktaz was a grieving father who really believed that he was avenging the murder of his son.

2) In THE IGNORED PROPHECY, Gerusa was narcissistic and her political maneuverings were designed for her own benefit. But she did really believe that the changes proposed by her hated ex-husband were going to destroy their people.

3) Zobran, in BLOOD WILL TELL, was unscrupulous, ruthless, and very dangerous, but he really believed that he was saving the world.

4) In MAGE STORM, Trav is seen only through Rell’s eyes. Still, despite his huge ego, he does believe that he has a solution to a problem that almost tore their world apart, once–and, of course, he thinks he deserves to be heavily rewarded for it

They’re antagonists, not villains. I didn’t have so much trouble writing them into the second or third draft.

Kaleran, in DREAMER’S ROSE, is a villain, true evil. His only goals are personal gratification. No one else really counts as even human in his mind. That’s the kind of antagonist this story needs. Nothing less than seeing the face of evil in his own son would set Lerian so off-kilter.

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Interesting post. I often used the words villain and antagonist interchangeably. However, after reading this post I now understand the difference.

I think it would be hard to write a character who is true evil without making him come off as one dimensional. Good luck with that. I hope you will write another post explaining more of your process. I want to know more.

I’ll let you know after it’s had a few readers. That’s the only way I’m going to know whether or not it worked. Last version, its only reader said Kaleran was too relatable, so I changed his motivation some (not what he wants, just why he wants it) and had him kill his sister. Hopefully, that takes care of any relatability issues.

I think even villains should be a little relatable. It is hard to strike the right balance. Killing his sister sounds very evil to me. Though, I agree with Robin that few people are pure evil. We just don’t understand their morality.

My job has taught me that there are very few people in the world whom I would classify as “pure evil.” Most people who do “bad” things simply have a very different morality. They have a want-take mentality, with the law as an inconvenience rather than a mandate (or even a guideline). It’s not so much that other people aren’t important–they just aren’t as important as #1. Put simply, they don’t play well with others. They don’t necessarily wish others ill or consider them lesser, but if the others stand in the way of what they want, well, that becomes a problem, and justifies a lot of “bad.”

Most of these will still love, laugh, and take care of the people who are important to them. They can feel betrayed if those people don’t support them in all the ways they feel they deserve to be suppported–just like the rest of us do.

Just a caution–don’t hollow out all the good in the persuit of “pure evil.” Neither pure good nor pure evil is all that interesting: both are too predictable.

Hopefully, by going back far enough to show his development into what he becomes, I’ve taken care of that. It’s one of the reasons I prefer this beginning rather than starting with Rose. Again, I won’t know for sure if I’ve hit the right notes until a few other people read it.

I have great fun creating protagonists that, by the end of the story, essentially come across as what some people might consider a villain. If done properly, the transformation is almost seamless, and the reader closes the last few pages to the sound of his/her own voice saying: “What the—“

I think if you made Lieran more involved as a father, the problem would go away. Kal’s evil but he has a reason, an excuse to be so. Upping the evilness factor doesn’t help if the reason for being evil is still so apparent. It also would make thee ending more poignant.

One story of a kid I tutor- his dad came in and said, he has a low grade. I want him passing. Here’s a credit card. Dad has an important career and spends his time doing important things and hey, he cared enough to pay a huge amount of money to us to fix his kid. Which we will do to the best of our abilities. And now that he has paid, he won’t come talk about kid’s needs and progress. He has given us a credit card and that is all he needs to do. When I found this out, I went, oh, that explains everything. That’s my biggest problem with kal- knowing his story, I nod and think yup, makes sense. And then I blame the hero when kal does worse and worse stuff, just like I don’t really blame my student and instead blame his dad.

Ah, all that’s changed since the version you read. The time-frame has been compressed, too. Kaleran’s motivation is much more his ambition and his fear and finding the easier way, not caring that that means literally stealing little bits of other people’s lives.

The only thing Lerian does is insist Kaleran wait until he’s grown and refuse to tell him the secrets until then. That’s coming partly out of Lerian’s own regrets. So Kaleran uses the forbidden knowledge just to find out what it will feel like, eventually, when Dad tells him the secret, gets hooked, and decides to keep doing it.

Sis finds out and Kaleran kills her to keep her from telling Dad, who figures it out anyway.

On the subject of Kaleran and pure evil… I’m of a mind that virtually nobody without true mental issues is “pure evil,” but that doesn’t make people with mental issues any less interesting or terrifying as villains. Have you researched the clinical definition of a psychopath? It’s a horribly overused word, but a proper definition of it would be centered on the idea of a person who simply has no conscience. He doesn’t understand why people would think some things are right or wrong. My understanding is that such people aren’t generally “made,” though they certainly have influences.

One of my favorite writing resources is “A Writer’s Guide to Character Traits” by Linda Edelstein. It includes hundreds of pages of profiles of different personality traits. It’s where I got the idea to make Grayson have selective mutism in City of Magi, and it helped influence how I developed a lot of the characters (what are the common traits of a confidence artist, and how does Grayson fit & defy those traits?)

Anyhow, I usually find Antagonists to be more interesting than Villains, but only because Villains are so rarely done well. The two best Villains I can think of from popular cinema are Hannibal Lecter and Heath Ledger’s Joker. The key element for both men was a complete lack of sanity; even if they did nothing violent, their simple presence in the room with you would drain the color from your face and put a mortal fear in you.

Voldemort, despite how much I generally like Harry Potter, is a horrible Villain almost every time I see the adult version, though the visions of him as a child are actually far more terrifying and interesting.

I agree, in general. But a villain is what this story needs. I would actually describe Kaleran as a psychopath.

I’ll have to add that to my short list of books to look for.

I kind of agree. Voldemort was better as the big bad bogey man on the fringe of the story than he was in person, except for his appearance in CHAMBER OF SECRETS, where he wasn’t much older than Harry. Of course, by then time Voldemort started appearing in the flesh, the reader was thoroughly hooked.

Yep – I have a love/hate relationship with the Harry Potter books for reasons like that. If I were teaching somebody how to write speculative fiction (which I am in no way qualified to do), and wanted to give them a list of horrible things (that you can’t do with magic, that you need to explain, that logically undermine a storyline) that will destroy your book, I’d come up with a list 20 or 30 long just from Harry Potter.

(Hermoine’s just chillin’ with time travel, and nobody thought to go kill evil magic Hitler? Nobody? Also… when time travelling, why are they in a hurry? Why is she always tired throughout the book from all the classes? She could get all the sleep she wants. … ergghh… I shouldn’t start.)

Despite all that, I love the Harry Potter books. They’re also a pretty good lesson in how to make strong (albeit stereotypical) characters and how to make rich interactions between them to hook the user. Rowling’s level of detail that goes into the backstory – stuff that is never presented to the reader, but is there nonetheless – is fantastic.